Lynn M. Morgan

Fetal subjects, feminist positions

Since Roe v. Wade, there has been increasing public interest in fetuses, in part as a result of effective antiabortion propaganda and in part as a result of developments in medicine and technology. While feminists have begun to take note of the proliferation of fetal images in various media, such as medical journals, magazines, and motion pictures, few have openly addressed the problems that the emergence of the fetal subject poses for feminism.Fetal Subjects, Feminist Positions foregrounds feminisms effort to focus on the importance of womens reproductive agency, and at the same time acknowledges the increasing significance of fetal subjects in public discourse and private experience. Essays address the public fascination with the fetal subject and its implications for abortion discourse and feminist commitment to reproductive rights in the United States. Contributors include scholars from fields as diverse as anthropology, communications, political science, sociology, and philosophy.This timely volume provides scholars and reproductive rights activists a forum for dialogue about fetuses without conceding to a moral or political agenda that would sanctify them at womens expense.

Romancing the Transgender Native: Rethinking the Use of the "Third Gender" Concept

This essay offers a critical examination of how “third gender” concepts are used in popular American writing by and about transgendered people. Over the past decade there has been an increase in the popular use of cross-cultural examples to provide legitimacy to transgender movements in the United States. Descriptions of the “transgender native” are often drawn from ethnographic portrayals of gender variation written by anthropologists for American audiences. Introductory anthropology textbooks commonly cite the hijra of India, the berdache of native North America, the xanith of the Arabian peninsula, the female husbands of western Africa, and the Sambia (a pseudonym) boys of Papua New Guinea who engage in “semen transactions.”1 Such examples are often glossed together under the “third gender” rubric. “Third gender” roles and practices were once regarded by most Western readers as exotica, with little relevance to our “modern” societies. These days, however, anthropological accounts of “third gender” variation are used frequently by popular writers such as Kate Bornstein and Leslie Feinberg, and by contributors to periodicals such as Transgender Tapestry and Transsexual News Telegraph, to buttress the argument that Western binary gender systems are neither universal nor innate. Paradoxically, this rise in popularity comes just when some anthropologists are finding serious fault with the “third gender” concept.2 This essay explores its appeal as well as recent critiques of it. We illustrate the critiques with excerpts taken from several popular academic and nonacademic works whose authors write about transgender theories and experiences, and we point out some of the analytic paradoxes, contradictions, and dangers inherent in invoking the transgender native.

Reproductive governance in Latin America

This paper develops the concept of reproductive governance as an analytic tool for tracing the shifting political rationalities of population and reproduction. As advanced here, the concept of reproductive governance refers to the mechanisms through which different historical configurations of actors – such as state, religious, and international financial institutions, NGOs, and social movements – use legislative controls, economic inducements, moral injunctions, direct coercion, and ethical incitements to produce, monitor, and control reproductive behaviours and population practices. Examples are drawn from Latin America, where reproductive governance is undergoing a dramatic transformation as public policy conversations are coalescing around new moral regimes and rights-based actors through debates about abortion, emergency contraception, sterilisation, migration, and assisted reproductive technologies. Reproductive discourses are increasingly framed through morality and contestations over ‘rights’, where rights-bearing citizens are pitted against each other in claiming reproductive, sexual, indigenous, and natural rights, as well as the ‘right to life’ of the unborn. The concept of reproductive governance can be applied to other settings in order to understand shifting political rationalities within the domain of reproduction.

The medicalization of anthropology: A critical perspective on the critical-clinical debate

The recent intensity of debate between clinical and critical perspectives can be attributed, in part, to increasing job competition among medical anthropologists in an unfavorable economic climate. If, as analysts predict, a decline occurs in academic and health sector jobs over the next few decades, the increasing medicalization of the field of anthropology will have unintended negative consequences. Awareness of these economic conditions may allow for some degree of disciplinary and theoretical rapprochement.

International politics and primary health care in Costa Rica

Costa Ricas internationally-renowned rural health program exemplifies the principles put forth by the 1978 Alma Ata Declaration on Primary Health Care with one exception: the government has not succeeded in achieving active community participation in health. This paper uses a historical and political-economic perspective to explain why the Costa Rican government failed in its efforts to enhance community participation after Alma Ata. International agencies have been closely involved in the design and implementation of rural health services in Costa Rica since the early 1900s, yet community participation did not figure in these programs until the mid-1970s. The demise of community participation in the early 1980s is attributed to a combination of factors including partisan conflicts, social class conflicts, interest group politics and, particularly, to the shifting priorities of international health and development agencies.

Health without Wealth? Costa Rica's Health System under Economic Crisis

In the late 1970s Costa Ricas health indicators had registered marked improvements over the previous decade, causing international health experts to cite the country as an example of successful primary health care. In 1980, however, Costa Rica suffered a severe economic recession which adversely affected the governments ability to maintain high standards of health service provision. The economic crisis resulted in deteriorated health status, health service reductions, increased reliance on foreign aid, and a growing public debate over the states role in health care. Meanwhile, the international agencies which had supported the expansion of Costa Ricas health infrastructure were becoming disenchanted with primary health care models and government-subsidized services. Costa Rica is now more dependent than ever on agencies whose policies have shifted toward government austerity and private, fee-for-service medicine. This study suggests that in times of economic recession and increased dependency, the health policies of underdeveloped countries will be shaped more by foreign political priorities and financial assistance than by the local governments commitment to health care. “Health without wealth” is the slogan which synthesizes Costa Ricas challenge: to maintain state control over a progressive nationalized health system without exceeding the austerity budget of the 1980s, yet without reducing services at a time when people most need them.

Claiming Rosa Parks: conservative Catholic bids for ‘rights’ in contemporary Latin America

When the Rosa Parks Prize was awarded to a conservative Argentine senator in 2009 for her outspoken opposition to contraception, sterilisation and abortion, it was clear that something odd was happening. This paper documents the appropriation of ‘human rights’ discourses by conservative Catholics in Latin America, where the recent success of reproductive and sexual rights social movements has generated a significant backlash. It specifically traces an effort by Catholic legal scholars to justify what they term ‘a distinctively Latin American approach to human rights’ while ignoring decades of human rights activism by others. Opponents of reproductive and sexual rights are deploying rights-talk selectively and strategically, it is argued, using this as secular cover to advance pro-life and pro-family policies.

The Potentiality Principle from Aristotle to Abortion

Anthropological theorizing about “potentiality” should include an understanding of the contemporary legacy of Aristotle’s potentiality principle. This paper approaches potentiality as an object of anthropological scrutiny to show how it is evoked, presented, debated, and circulated among people interacting in a social realm. The potentiality principle, I argue, has been kept alive by Catholic moral philosophers who argue that embryos should not be killed because they possess the attributes that they will have later in life. Catholic moral philosophers and their feminist critics and interlocutors emerge in this paper as active agents who condition and shape the contemporary uses of the concept of potentiality. By looking at how potentiality debates are intellectually and historically situated, I argue for reflexive ethnographic attention to the politics of potentiality.

“Life Begins When They Steal Your Bicycle”: Cross‐Cultural Practices of Personhood at the Beginnings and Ends of Life

This paper examines two reasons anthropological expertise has recently come to be considered relevant to American debates about the beginnings and ends of life. First, bioethicists and clinicians working to accommodate diverse perspectives into clinical decision-making have come to appreciate the importance of culture. Second, anthropologists are the recognized authorities on the cultural logic and behaviors of the “Other.” Yet the definitions of culture with which bioethicists and clinicians operate may differ from those used by contemporary anthropologists, who view culture as a contingent, contested set of social practices that are continually formulated and re-negotiated in daily interactions. Using ethnographic examples, the author argues that the qualities that constitute “personhood” should be sought in social practices rather than in cognitive capacities or moral attributes.

Culture, Health, and Science: A Multidisciplinary Liberal Arts Alternative to the Public Health Major.

Since the 2003 call by the Institute of Medicine to educate undergraduates in public health, various models have emerged for incorporating public health into the liberal arts and sciences. One model is a professionalized public health major that uses core public health competencies to prepare a workforce of health professionals. A second model offers a broad-based public health major rooted in liberal arts principles, resisting the utilitarian trend toward human capital formation. A third model resists even the label of “public health,” preferring instead to introduce undergraduates to many ways of analyzing human health and healing. The multidisciplinary Culture, Health, and Science Program, based on six key commitments for preparing liberal arts students to analyze health and respond to global health challenges, is offered as an alternative to the public health major.